"Carrot salad, relative velocity and (im)mortality" (originally posted May 1st 2014)

"Carrot salad, relative velocity and (im)mortality"
To the driver of a silver Hyundai i30 with a small blue sticker on its side:

Dear madam, 

I would like to bring to your attention the following details which may have escaped your notice earlier today* (*= 11:17am on May 1st 2014). Since you are never going to read this, and I am thus writing mostly for my own benefit, I shall not apologise for writing in English. Nevertheless, these are the facts I would seek to acquaint you with if I could:
This morning I was driving the route I usually drive to work and almost anywhere else. I was going to see my friends for a barbecue. I had in a box on my passenger seat a big covered bowl of very juicy carrot salad, quite well contained and held in place, and below it a bag with my mobile phone, camera, and assorted electronics. I was already going to arrive a bit later than I would have liked, having been held up, notably by the carrot salad; yet having been reassured by our prospective host the preceding evening that timeliness was not a criterium to worry about, I did not drive anywhere near the speed people usually employ on that segment, as indeed they legally may. I had quite a few things on my mind, and just then an itch in my nose staying just shy of letting me sneeze. When I saw you come driving up, I scarcely paid you any heed. I noticed you about as much as the big hedge to the right of the road, which was starting to come into bloom, or the approaching rain clouds, which were just cresting the ridge across the valley.
When you did, however, take a sudden sharp left, ignoring a stop sign and me going that way, and pulled out right in front of me, I noticed you.
I did more than notice you.
In fact, as my foot crushed the brake pedal down as fast and hard as it could before my brain had consciously realised it wanted to give the order, I saw you.
I saw you looking straight ahead, cigarette in your left hand, mobile phone in your right, both clutching the steering wheel.
I saw your face in profile, and the frustration on it at having taken a wrong turn earlier leading you up a hill and out of town and now having to do a detour and a dangerously sharp spontaneously left to compensate; a thesis corroborated by my mind in overdrive mode supplying the colour of your number plate and the first two letters of your car's registration, barely glimpsed from a corner of the eye when first glancing your way moments before, and considered in context of the location and a host of factors instantly crystal clear to me.
In that drawn-out moment, with my eyes dashing from reference point to reference point, my brain frantically calculating relative speeds and the quickly diminishing distance, I thought I saw every little scratch and dent and smear of dirt and wet tree blossom petal sticking to your car.
I saw your teenage daughter sitting in the passenger seat and your pre-teen son in the right back seat. She looked pre-occupied, maybe thinking of whomever she had put on a little too much makeup for. He looked bored, and resigned to whatever family- and food-related fate was supposed to be awaiting you.
As I heard and felt through the sole of my foot my car's anti-lock braking system angrily whirr into service, I saw both their heads swivel around in perfect unison. Your son's face was mildly intrigued. Your daughter seemed to comprehend in that same timeless flash. I would swear I saw her eyes widening as she saw me hurtling towards you. I would be prepared to bet that her jostled mind saw every detail of me with the same startled surreal clarity that I was experiencing in that instant.
Staring at your children's faces with every fibre of my optical nerves straining, the labels "gryphon" and "cat" popped into my consciousness. By this I mean no insult to your children. In retrospect, I realised that somewhere at the back of my skull, a set of neurons were firing excitedly, happy at finally storing a perfect snapshot to connect to an empathetic experience related a long time ago in Ursula K. LeGuin's 7-page short story "Direction of the Road", of a car crash told from the perspective of an oak tree, published in "The Wind's Twelve Quarters", my copy of which is decorated by an image of a gryphon and a cat. In that story, a young driver sees that looming oak tree in a way he never saw it before, sees it truly, sees it out of time, sees in it eternity, and sees in it death hurtling towards it. And that that was what I was seeing in your children's faces. This my intertextual mind understood, but I had no time to fully understand that, then.
Instead, I understood that your car had already lost a lot of its momentum in that sharp left turn you'd demanded of it.
Just as my mathematical mind was calmly informing me that the numbers were probably not going to add up, -"close! but nope", you either picked up on your kids' reactions, or realised you were still going too fast to safely make that hastily executed turn, and slammed down on your own brakes. Your head never turned, and you never saw me.
As soon as my eyes darted to your car's change in angle and momentum, my extrapolating imagination overwrote my vision with the projection of your car coming to rest in road at about a 30° angle close to perpendicular right across my path, your children looking at me, their bodies protected from the solid engine block of my car by nothing but the thin egg-shell of sheet metal and glass of your car's flank.
"Nope, not even close to close!" - my mathematical mind chimed in helpfully.
I could not say whether the snarl I felt had time to form on my face before I had finished pulling my car off the road. It must have been there by the time my car came to full stop, my left rearview mirror perhaps 3cm from yours. It certainly hadn't left my face completely yet, for I saw you seeing it there as you leaned forward and turned and looked around your daughter's head and saw me for the first time and saw it on my face, for your mouth formed a silent, almost comical "Oh", followed by guilt and embarassment flashing across your features.
I saw your daughter's nostrils flaring as she finally took a deep breath, and the stunned look on your son's face finally turning into dawning comprehension, and I bowed and nodded you all a courteous greeting, which you may not have seen me finish, for you swivelled your steering wheel and put your foot down and sped away.
I had watched you hurry down the hill and disappear around the bend in the road before looking beside me, and with a sigh more relief than frustration took to digging my mobile phone and camera out of a notably uncontained mound of carrot salad on my car's floor, and wiping more bits of carrot off my dashboard and salad dressing and juice off my seat as best I could.
I would like to tell you all this if I could, not to moan about the carrot salad and mess, nor even to overly berate you ( -well, okay, quite a bit, actually, but within reason- ) about your reckless lack of attention and sore negligence. While you undoubtedly do deserve a stern talking-to for using your phone while driving, and a really stern yelling-at for smoking in your car while driving your kids, but that's still not what I want to tell you. You really should be able to figure out all of that on your own, if you know only a fraction of all these things that seem to have escaped your notice.
No, what I really want to tell you is that I am grateful! If any religious nutcase wants to jump on this perceived opening, well, please feel free to f*ck off and take your superstition and magical thinking with you. The only superhuman entities that resolved this crisis of opposing velocities of moving bodies were science, engineering and education. Your hypothetical conclusions make me wary of being grateful for the road being dry and the rain only starting a couple minutes later, and a number of similar very small factors beyond my control whose potential differences would have made this outcome drastically different from carrot salad all over my stuff.
I am, however, grateful to some people who directly influenced this outcome! I am grateful to my friend Gérard for telling me not to worry about punctuality. I am grateful to the people that made anti-lock braking a European safety standard. I am even grudgingly grateful to that overbearing, bad-tempered, pedantic safety inspector who recently forced me pay to have my car's brakes completely redone even though I had previously been assured they were still in reasonably good shape and technically still well above required minimum safety standards. I am grateful to my reasonably young body and all the parts of its sensory and cognitive apparatus that functioned as well as they conceivably could have today. Most of all, I am grateful to your children. I am grateful to your children for not being dead now. I struggle with my own mortality as much as the next guy, but I am grateful that when I saw them and when they saw me in those timeless 2.7 seconds, that wasn't the last thing they saw and the last thing that they were going to see for all eternity, that that immortality was not to be mine and that time resumed, and, for better or worse, we can keep going. And go mindfully, and pay attention as we go.